CAT5E is expensive. Our unit would go through several boxes during exercises or deployments just making 20-30ft long patch cables to support, most of which was only used during that mission only to be bundled up and taken to post recycling afterwards (cause we're environmentally friendly!). Not only monetarily is it expensive, but time wise, it was taxing. A well trained installer can terminate a CAT5 cable in about 4 minutes on average. To wire up 8 drops, it takes one installer working about an 45 minutes after taking into account running the cable properly.

Enter the InstaDrop system. This DIY project provides 8 drops of re-usable cable to a TOC, cuts that 45 minute installation time to about 5 and in the long run saves you green: green cable, green money and green environment (not that I'm a hippy or anything, blood does more to make the green grass grow).

Situation: Change of Command Inventory.

Problem: It's all hands on deck getting equipment on the Commander's hand receipt lined up, in the hall way or out in the motor pool, in LIN order followed by NSN order along with all of it's BII. This is done in large part to minimize the time it takes for the Commander conducting the inventory to flip through the many printed out pages of his property book and find the item being inventoried. To save a few hours of his time, we spend a few days doing this work to prepare.

Solution: Wouldn't it be nice if we could just have that hand receipt on digits, scan a bar code, automagically search the document and highlight it? Well now you can! Introducing the Search And Highlight Excel (SAHE) xlsm document!

It's been a couple months since my last major post of anything, but  I have a good excuse reason. I spent a good month or so studying and achieving the CISSP and the rest of the time working on the latest release of AIMS. Seriously took me about 2 weeks to figure out why lateral transfers and turn ins were taking so long to process (ended up being a primary key issue that took about 5 seconds to correct; figures). 

So, yes, there are some minor schema changes to the database. And using the new frontend with the old backend won't work. But don't worry, there is a script that will upgrade the old Beta 1 database to the new Beta 2 without loosing any of the old information for both the Standalone and Enterprise editions.